Mohamed Mokbel, Assistant Professor,
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota will present a seminar entitled "Privacy and Personalization in Location-based Database Servers".

Abstract:
Combining the functionality of location-detection devices, wireless communications, and database systems results in realizing location-based services as commercial products and research prototypes. The main promise is to provide meaningful information to users based on an awareness of their current locations. This talk addresses our work at University of Minnesota that is geared towards enabling ubiquitous deployment of location-based services in daily life, i.e., building the necessary infrastructure behind location-based services such that their use is tantamount to that of the internet, phone, and electricity. We identify and tackle two main obstacles that hinder the ubiquity goal of location-based services, namely, privacy and personalization. For privacy, social science literature indicates that users are relatively paranoid about their private location information, and hence may not accept the ubiquity of location-based services. In terms of personalization, existing location-based services are so rigid as they only consider the location context while ignoring user preferences and other context types. In this talk, we will highlight our work in the Casper and CareDB projects that provide privacy and personalization, respectively, in location-based database servers.

Biography:
Mohamed Mokbel is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota. His main research interests focus on advancing the state of the art in the design and implementation of database engines to cope with the requirements of emerging applications (e.g., location-based applications and sensor networks). Mohamed has been the main architect for the Casper system that is considered as the first attempt to provide a database support for privacy-preserving location-based queries. His most recent research includes embedding context and preference-awareness inside database management systems. His research work has been recognized by two best paper awards at IEEE MASS 2008 and MDM 2009. Mohamed is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award 2010. Mohamed has actively participated in several program committees for major conferences including ICDE, SIGMOD, VLDB, SSTD, and ACM GIS. He is/was a program co-chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2008, 2009, and 2010. Mohamed is an ACM and IEEE member and a founding member of ACM SIGSPATIAL.